Thursday, November 13, 2014

Big News at Biblioteca Lobitos

Since this is our first Library blog post, it´s actually a
couple weeks of Libros A Lobitos news.
The first, most exciting (and most obvious) news is that WE HAVE A LOCATION! After lots of scouting and planning, we
finally have a physical spot picked out for the library. There´s still a ton of work to be done before
she´s fully operational, but we are well on our way to opening Biblioteca
Lobitos.

Last week, we had a traveling muralist from Colombia who was
kind enough to donate his time and tallents to our beautification efforts and
painted potraits of four famous Latin American authors (Pablo Neruda, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende and Gabriela Mistral) inside the future
library.

We´ve also been doing English club with students from
secondary school three times a week from 4-6pm and getting a great
turnout. These are the kids I was
working with all of last year (both in school and in extracirricular English
activities) and they are SUCH a fantastic group.

Although English isn´t the
main focus of the library, as a teacher, I have quite the soft spot for kids
who want to learn and are motivated to do so.
When they started talking more and more about wanting to reinitiate
English Club, it seemed like a great way to hit the ground running and start
utilizing the space immediately. We are
also taking advantage of the opportunity and using it as a pilot program for loaning
books out and the kids are devouring everything on the shelves (currently in my
bedroom, until we get them built in the library). We´ve still got a long way to go but it´s
exciting to see that kids are already getting excited about books and about
using this new educational space.

Keep checking in for more
updates as we progress towards launching our full program!